Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870, which has core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 is 45% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 47616 (45%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be quite a bit (about 274%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58624 (274%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be a lot (about 50%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10624 (50%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.